We’re excited to welcome a woman into membership this coming Lord’s Day. As always, these are opportunities grant us the opportunity to reaffirm our church covenant with each other. This article is also timely as this Lord’s Day morning we’ll handle the subject of tithing from Malachi.

​Continuing in our series on our church covenant (find earlier blogs here and our actual covenant here), we press into 1. 3.6:

To contribute cheerfully and regularly to the support of the ministry as the Lord directs and personal circumstances permit, the expenses of the church, the relief of the poor, and the spread of the Gospel through all nations;
 
To be sure, the Lord calls us, His redeemed, in gratitude, to worship and serve Him in our time, treasure and talents. We may not all have as much time, treasure or talents, however, as Christians we all commit to serving Him as personal circumstances permit. There are certain baselines (like the tithe for treasure, Mal 3:10) and sometimes the Lord directs us in more time (full-time ministry, e.g. 1 Ti 5:17) or different giftings (1 Cor 12:11). We may all give of our time, treasure and time in differing proportions, but all give we must. Plenty and want, sickness and heath, may all be limiting factors, however, like the widow who gave all we had (Mk 12:41), we are called to serve the Lord in our time, treasure and talents, aspiring ever more from the basics to serve Him as we can knowing there may be genuine limiting factors.

Why do we do this? For the Lord of course. The Lord calls us to love Him by loving His Church, supporting His people and sustaining her worship, and loving others by loving the lost and loving the poor.[1] We rob God when we are not generous with our time, treasure and talents. We also rob others if we don’t by placing undue weight upon the few. And we mustn’t forget we are more blessed if we give than if we receive (Acts 20:35), for giving is to be like God, and if He is our Father, we shall be like Him (1 Jn 3:9–10).

How are you using your time and treasure and talents here at MBC?


[1] Primarily, I believe that such service should be conducted through local churches, however, it may be done privately as well. 

​We are living in spiritually challenging times, yet spiritually exciting times. They are times in which the Lord is calling His people to be ready, to be ready to evangelize and disciple the broken, the hurting, the lost—those without any church experience. Church history is in the making. Are you ready?
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Let me tell you three short stories of what the Lord has done in the last week or so:

• A lady who had checked us out on Youtube, troubled by the darkness of our times, the Charlie Kirk assassination, and generally just down, a non-Christian friend said she should try going to church. We were able to meet up, I listened, brought the Gospel into her situation and gave her a Bible at her request. God is working.
• A psycho-therapist from the city (secular for all I know) rang the church. She asked if we would be open to partnering to help her client who lived in the area. She said he needed community and purpose (two things the church can offer!). When I asked why she was reaching out to us (a church, a religious organization), she said: a) she found our website, and b) we had what he needed. God is working.
• A young non-Christian couple visited church. They were seeking religious and spiritual answers and a conservative homeschooling environment for their children. They were ripe to consider everything we shared about Christ and openly asked some great question. God is working.

God is working. It has been called the quiet revival. The bigger question remains whether we, God’s people, the local Church, are ready? Do you feel ready and equipped to share your faith, to tell others who ask the Gospel? If not, come out Sunday night for an “Evangelism 101” training seminar. Even if you do feel ready, like CPR training, it is always good to have a refresher and share your insights with others. 

To understand ‘an evangelastic’ one first needs to understand that it is a play on words with an evangelical. An evangelical is a broad adjective to describe Christian, ‘an evangelical Christian.’ All Christians should be evangelical because evangelical, euangelion in Greek, simply means Gospel. And the Gospel is at the heart of the Christian faith. It is the good news of Jesus death and resurrection (1 Cor 15:3–5), the proclamation of the good news of a king who’d won victory over sin and death and hell so that sinners who repent and trust in this King might have forgiveness and new life.

That is not all an evangelical is. Evangelicals, like all Christians, uphold the early Creeds as expressions of Biblical teaching, and as Protestants, uphold the core Reformed tenets of the Reformation (like the 5 solas, or the major confessions of Protestant orthodoxy, etc). Historian David Bebbington further identified 4 categories common to most evangelicals: biblicism: a focus on Scripture, crucicentrism: proclaiming Christ crucified, conversionism: the need for change, to repent and believe; and activism: spreading the good news and helping the poor.

So, if this is a glimpse of what it means to be evangelical, what is an evangelistic?

Enter the rubber band, first patented in 1845. Bands to hold things together that were elastic quickly became part of the office landscape (and toyscape too!). Elastics are stretchy.

Thus, when a friend of mine heard a native Cornish speaker from Cornwall, England, with his thick accent try to say ‘evangelical,’ my friend mistook him to have said, ‘evangelastic.’ Because of the stretchiness of many modern evangelicals, he loved it and the term was coined. I have since used it extensively.

An evangelistic is someone who generally holds to the above but has departed from some aspect (or aspects) of the old evangelical consensus. Sometimes this is for want of sound teaching, but more often because they are seeking to be less offensive to the culture, conform to prevailing trends, be seeker sensitive, etc. Thus they ‘stretch’ their beliefs beyond the form of the original.
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We should of course be adaptable to the times, however, we should never abandoned key evangelical tenets for convenience’s sake. Let us not be evangelastics!

A sermon preached at Toronto Baptist Seminary chapel on Nov 11, AD 2025 from John 15:13.

An intergenerational men's breakfast talk on the lost virtue of valour. 

Today is Reformation Day, the day when Protestants remember Martin Luther posting his 95 arguments and thus starting a movement to reform the Catholic Church called the Reformation. On the surface the Reformation was about justification by faith. However, at its heart it was about authority. Protestants believe that Scripture alone is authoritative and Catholics believe that Scripture and Tradition are co-equally authoritative.
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Fast forward some 500 years. In a culture that is so subjective and post-modern that it is adrift, people are looking for meaning. As such, there is a quiet revival happening in religious life. Whereas in the 90s and early 2000s religion was declining because of secularism, today it is on the rise. There are two areas where statistics, news articles and experience all reveal where growth is happening: in classically evangelical churches and in Catholic/Orthodox churches. In the former it is because eternal truth is proclaimed uncompromisingly, in the latter because of the emphasis on ancient tradition. Truth and tradition are drawing people back to visible Christianity.  

However, another interesting trend has been happening, a Reformation reversal of sorts. There have been news articles of Protestant pastors ‘swimming the Tiber’ and converting to Catholicism. Likewise, there are personal examples of those raised in Protestant homes and churches converting to Catholicism. This isn’t widespread and there are still many Catholics who convert to Christ. Still, what is driving this phenomenon?

I suggest three main reasons:

1. Worship: Much modern, mega-church, charismatic worship is about YOU and not GOD. Likewise, the setting and atmosphere is CONTEMPORARY. When you ‘go to church’ it feels like just another compartment of the world and not something different. Gone is the reverent simplicity of classic Protestantism and so people seek holy mystery in the Catholic/Orthodox church.
2. Truth/Theology: It is sad to say, but Protestants, who once knew their Bibles and theology so well, are often biblically illiterate and theologically ignorant. Do they really know what they believe and why they believe it? Can they defend it against (not only the world) but aggressive Catholic apologists? Despite various sects within the Catholic Church, it has a clear basic set of beliefs. Listen to mother church vs. all the many views of the Protestants. Protestants, who held much in common initially, have so fragmented because of poor interpretation of the Bible that where there was once a Protestant orthodoxy, now we might speak of that in the plural. While we want to know what the Bible says, no one can know everything they and so are left to depend on the Church. Catholics tell you to believe this and to believe that. Protestants used to hold out the truth to believe, all the while giving strong biblical reasoning, however, because of a culture of niceness, made worse by theological fragmentation and simplicity, many Protestants struggle to offer a cohesive vision.
3. Tradition: Truth is primary. Nevertheless tradition (meaning the living faith of the dead) has an important helping role. Many Protestant churches are so contemporary and their beliefs so diluted that they have lost touch with their Christian forebearers. Just as we are biblically illiterate and theologically ignorant we also have historic amnesia. Catholics come along and claim uninterrupted succession from Peter and that constancy and tradition appear very attractive (it is also flawed for their have been many schisms in church history). They point out that Protestantism is only 500 years old whereas Catholicism is 2000 years old. However, Protestants aren’t restorationists, we don’t believe the church ceased to exist during the middle ages (c.f. Mt 16- I will build my church) but rather that she had become corrupted and needing reform to bring her back into alignment with the truth of Scripture. This is what the Reformation did and it is a glorious heritage! And not only do we have the first 1500 years of church history to draw meaning from but our own deep roots: Protestant confessions of faith, the examples of noble men and women.

We have no need as Protestants to become this or that but have great reason to continue to praise God for the Reformation. In remaining classical Protestants (or perhaps returning to) we find everything we need on worship, truth and history to find meaning and purpose in our mission today and tomorrow. 

How wonderful it was last Lord’s Day to welcome a new family into the church through the right hand of fellowship and, likewise, a young lady into the fellowship through baptism. It is a good time to pick back up on our blogs on our church covenant.
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Read pt. I here, pt. II here, and pt. III here. 

​Life can be full (sometimes too full and we need to reevaluate our priorities and use of time). However, it should never be too full for the Lord. One way we express our love for Him is by being lovingly committed to our local church.
 
Now, even in a small church it is difficult, and unnecessary, to attend everything. However, as a church grows this becomes impossible. So how does one express their commitment through membership and in time to the local church? Let’s walk backwards.
 
The cornerstone of the Christian week and life is the Lord’s Day, which we believe is ‘in a unique sense, the appointed day of worship.’ It isn’t that we don’t or can’t worship God the other six days, but this is the day that is His and He has commanded, and indeed is worthy of, our public and corporate worship. It is the day when the whole church gathers. As members we put God first and connect with each other when we gather for our two main weekly gatherings, the morning and evening worship gatherings each Lord’s Day. This, I tell all people, is the starting point. Now sometimes you may have to work early on Monday and can’t come to the evening service, or perhaps you are sick, or away on vacation and so can’t come to the morning service or either, however, the normal expectation is that we’ll be there (and take advantage of online options when we can’t, or visit another church when we’re away). While not commanded by God, our quarterly members’ meetings are similar for it is when the church gathers to discuss important matters for her life and ministry. We should seek to book these in our calendars and plan to attend.
 
Once we’ve put the Lord first in these basics we can engage, ‘as the Lord directs and personal circumstances permit,” in other activities and ministries of the church. We should all have at least one area where we serve as we are able. If there are extra events we should attend and support them as interested (i.e. not everyone loves the science of CMI or getting up early for a men’s breakfast; some ministries are also for specific groups within the church: children, women, seniors, etc), or are able (i.e. some events might conflict with work trips, or a family vacation or another event in our life like a hobby).
 
The premise of this article in our covenant is that we commit to putting the Lord’s Day first and then building outward from there. 

A funeral sermon at Marilyn Coolidge's funeral, Friday Sept 26, AD 2025. 

Ref: Proposed Affirmation of Faith; March 12, 2025 e-update from Steve Jones
*I’ve bolded the points I feel are more major. I’ve underlined personal implications.
*If you are a church member, don’t read this until you’ve first read the proposed AoF for yourself. 

I was born into a Fellowship Baptist church in Springfield, ON. It was my grandmother’s church near the family farm. Thankfully it continues to be a faithful and robust Christian witness.